So you have an idea for a product that can capture the attention of consumers everywhere.
Or you might have stumbled on the new services, and people need them desperately. This is the right time to take a leap and don’t look back.
But first, off you need to determine the market for your service or product before shifting into high gear.
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How can you do it? It is simple; you need to conduct market research. Here’s how to do a market research. Are you ready? Let’s get into it!
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What is a market research?
It is a process of collecting information about customers, target audience, buyer personas of your business to determine how successful your service or product would be among these people.
Why do you need to do market research
You can meet your customers where they are due to market research. It also provides you with deep insight into several things that impact your business’s bottom line, including:
- Where your current clients or customers and target audience conduct their service or product research
- What is trending or in the eyes of your target audience in your industry
- Who makes up the market and their challenges.
- What are the options that your target audience have for purchase
- Who are your possible competitors
- What influence the conversions among your buyers
Advantages of lean market research
Lean UX design is specially designed for improvement that depends on efficient market research to test new features and understand your customer needs. It can help you become more efficient, competitive, and cost-effective.
Efficient
You can be closer to your customers.
Competitive
The powerful and quick insight can put your service or product at the forefront.
Cost-effective
Lean market research is cost-effective because you have no need to hire a marketing company to get things started.
4 Common market research methods
You can do market research using different ways and gather information about your customers. So, don’t limit yourself to only one research method.
There are common market research methods that include customer observation, focus groups, interviews, and surveys.
Observation
In this method, your company’s representative takes notes that which product customers use the most and get engaged with a similar product from your competitor. There are a lot of things that make the observation more powerful.
There is a good alternative to focus groups, i.e. fly on the wall. It is relatively less expensive, and you will observe the buyers interact with your product without influencing each other. But it comes with some drawbacks like you can’t see what is inside their heads. That’s why there is no replacement for interviews and surveys.
Focus groups
A Focus Group is a market research technique that brings together around 5 to 10 people that give feedback about your product, marketing campaign, and service. A trained moderator leads a discussion to gather helpful information about your product or services.
Why is it most dangerous
Don’t start with the focus group if you just started out your market research. It is a very expensive method, and if you cut corners, then your research may have all kinds of errors. It could get skewed due to moderator style bias and dominance bias. The former can be a forceful participant that can influence the whole group while the latter means when different moderators get different results in the same study.
Interviews
It is a one-on-one conversation with people. If you want to get deep insight, in-person interviews are the best way. If a face-to-face interview is not possible, you can conduct an interview through video conferencing. No matter how you conduct the interview, it will produce great benefits that help you understand your customers and target market.
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There are a lot of things that make the interviews more insightful. You can gain empathy for their experience by speaking with your customers. You can produce a lot of ‘aha!’ moments by following the insightful threads.
Surveys
Surveys are the most commonly used method that is used for market research. In surveys, you can ask a series of both close and open-ended questions.
You can send your questions via email. But what makes it more popular, especially online surveys? Because it is a very inexpensive method and you can conduct online surveys very easily.
It means you can get a lot of insightful data quickly. Plus, you can analyze this data very easily, especially the open-ended questions whose answers might initially seem difficult to categorize.
How to do market research
Doing market research seems a daunting task, but this is what can be beneficial for your business. You can do market research by leveraging the above-mentioned market research methods.
Let’s start with the step-by-step process of how to do market research.
Start by identifying your target market
The first step of market research is to identify your target market.
Suppose someone walks into your business or makes a call, he/she is your ideal customer. If someone has a problem and you have a solution, then he will be willing to pay, then he is your perfect customer. Now pay attention to the details about this customer. Who are they and how you can describe them?
Ideal customers and common traits
Your ideal customer is what you want to target. He/she is your target market, but your business might have many target markets.
But two to three target markets will serve you best. But keep in mind that these target markets should share common traits such as demographic traits. They include gender, age group, location, and income levels.
They might be psychographic traits which mean those people that have similar interests and like similar things. Or, your target market might be c-level executives at another company like the head of the IT department or CTO.
Target markets are a mix of psychographic and demographic groups. For instance, you might design new athletic shoes for female triathletes, or you might launch a new clothing line targeting hipster men.
Market segmentation
Market segmentation means creating multiple target markets. This sounds complicated, but you segment your target market into a different group that you want to sell.
Each market segments have diverse characteristics and might buy your service or product for multiple reasons. You can run different marketing campaigns for all market segments. You can also customize your service or product for each segment.
Talk to your potential customers
Once you know who your target market is or identified your ideal target audience, then you need to take the key step in this process of market research.
Now, it’s time to get up from your chair and go outside. Yes, you need to get out, go and talk to your potential customers or target market.
It is called primary market research. You can also do online surveys, but there is no alternative to talking to your prospective customers.
You will get deep insights into your potential customers by seeing their work and get a better understanding of how they make buying decisions by talking with them. No survey will ever give you all these details.
Find out if your market is big enough
After identifying your target market or potential customers and validated it by talking to them, you need to do some in-depth research to find out either your target market is big enough to sustain your business.
If it is not big enough to sustain your competitors and your business, then consider changing the product and services you are offering.
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For instance, if you have only a few thousand prospective customers in your target market, try to sell to them or sell at a higher price to create a profitable and sustainable business.
Document your findings
The final step in the entire market research process is to document what you find.
If you want to know how formal your documentation should be, it relies on how you plan on using it. If you want to share your findings with your partners and your team in your business, then you can communicate informally.
If you are looking for angel investors, then you need to write more formal market research and do market forecasts as well.
Write a formal market analysis for your business’s investors. Now here a question arises that how to present your market research.
A buyer persona is a single documentation that every business should create.
A buyer persona is a description that hits on all the most important aspects of your potential customers or target market.
If you have different target markets, then you must have several buyer personas.
The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to convert your target market’s information from research to a breathing buyer persona.
If you are a brand and create a buyer persona, then it will drive much of your product development. Moreover, it represents the attributes of your potential customers.
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